Radeon HD 4850 2GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which has GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1120(224x5) Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5830 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 64448 (101%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be much (more or less 79%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19800 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (28%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.